Shakespeare and the controversy over Richard III’s remains
By Philip Schwyzer
What are we going to do with Richard III? More than a year after his bones were unearthed in Leicester, the last Plantagenet king is still waiting for a resting place.
In the footsteps of the fashionable world
By Hannah Greig
Each autumn, throughout the 1700s, London’s West End was transformed. Previously quiet squares were populated again, first by servants and tradesmen. After the houses were readied, their employers journeyed to the capital from their country estates between October and January. Snow, noted one observer, ‘brings up all the Fine folks [to London], flocking like half-frozen birds into a Farm-yard, from the terror…of another fatal month’s confinement…in the country’.
How to be an English language tourist?
By David Crystal
Hilary and I asked ourselves this question repeatedly when we were planning the tour that we eventually wrote up as Wordsmiths and Warriors: The English-Language Tourist’s Guide to Britain. Where can you find out about the places that influenced the character and study of the English language in Britain? How do you get there? And what do you find when you get there?
King Richard’s worms
By Philip Mackowiak
It has been said that the only persons who refer to themselves as “we” are royalty, college professors, and those with worms. In the 4 September 2013 issue of the Lancet, Piers Mitchell and colleagues present evidence that Richard III, one of England’s best known medieval kings and the deformed villain of Shakespeare’s Richard III, had two reasons for referring to himself in the first person plural.
Heaney, the Wordsworths, and wonders of the everyday
By Lucy Newlyn
Here is one of the poems Dorothy wrote from her sick room. Dated by her as 1836 (and copied out for the Wordsworths’ friend and neighbour Isabella Fenwick in 1839), it gives us some insight into her state of mind as she looked back on a crisis in 1832-3 when her life was in danger.
The first tanks and the Battle of Somme
By Paul Jankowski
“And there, between them, spewing death, unearthly monsters.” To a Bavarian infantry officer on the Somme in the early morning hours of 15 September 1916, the rhomboid, tracked behemoths lurching at him amidst waves of attacking enemy infantry had no name.
Shakespeare’s hand in the additional passages to Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy
By Douglas Bruster
Why should we think that Shakespeare wrote lines first published in the 1602 quarto of The Spanish Tragedy, a then-classic play by his deceased contemporary Thomas Kyd? Our answer starts 180 years ago, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge—author of ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner—said he heard Shakespeare in this material.
Remembering the slave trade
By Jean Allain
Today is International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, established by UNESCO “to inscribe the tragedy of the slave trade in the memory of peoples”. That tragedy was the development of, in Robin Blackburn’s words, a “different species of slavery”. One that took the artisan slavery of old (consisting in the main of handfuls of slaves working on small estates or as domestic servants) and industrialised it, creating plantations in the Americas which fed the near insatiable appetite of Europeans for sugar, coffee, and tobacco.
A Who’s Who of the Edinburgh Festival
By Daniel Parker
It’s that time of year again; Edinburgh is ablaze with art, theatre and music from around the world. For the month of August, Edinburgh is the culture capital of the world, as thousands of musicians, street-performers, actors, comedians, authors, and artists demonstrate their art at various venues across the city. Listed in Who’s Who and Who Was Who are some of the most famous names to have performed at the festival since its inception in 1947.
Who were the Carlisle Commissioners? Part two: Jeremy Bentham
By Daniel Parker
Jeremy Bentham wanted to become a Carlisle Peace Commissioner but his application was wilfully ignored by Governor Johnstone. The Carlisle Peace Commissioners set out to the United States in 1778, three years into the American Revolutionary War, to negotiate a peace treaty.
Who were the Carlisle Commissioners? Part one
By Dr. Robert V. McNamee
In July, Electronic Enlightenment (EE) updated with materials taken from the Virginia Historical Society and the correspondence of Adam Ferguson, amongst others. These apparently disparate historical correspondences (and others already published in EE) are brought together within this unique digital framework so that students, scholars and the public can read, in this instance, “across the Atlantic”.
Walter Scott’s anachronisms
By Ian Duncan
One of Sir Walter Scott’s creations has been much in the news lately: his country house at Abbotsford was formally reopened to the public by Her Majesty the Queen on 3 July 2013, following a £12 million restoration.
Money, prices, and growth in pre-industrial England
By Nick Mayhew
At a time when governments across the world are pursuing the elusive goal of economic growth, it may be instructive to consider the historical evidence for growth in Britain.
Natural wonder or national symbol? A history of the Victoria Regia
Few could have imagined the elusive floral wonder retrieved in January 1837 from the heart of Guyana’s wildest jungles– and fewer still could have predicted the extent to which it would transform an entire continent’s cultural and aesthetic sensibilities.
Two faces of the Limited Test Ban Treaty
By Jacob Darwin Hamblin
Fifty years ago, the United States, United Kingdom, and Soviet Union signed a pact to stop testing nuclear bombs in the atmosphere, oceans, and space. As we commemorate the treaty, we will not agree on what to celebrate. There are two sides of the story.
A lion: Joseph Paxton in the nineteenth century and today
By Tatiana Holway
Two hundred years ago today, on 3 August 1813, Joseph Paxton turned ten. In a farm hand’s family of nine children, this was likely to have been a nonevent. A decade after that, the day would also have come and gone like any other.